- dibbs089
- |
- Elder Mythic Member
From the Flood re-release
Terminal L
Report 12
Batch 416
Span 1445
Military activity beyond the sphere is becoming frantic. The relative calm here impedes my sense of urgency. I find myself reading their reports just to provoke my own emotional response.
My report, however, isn't quite so dramatic.
As predicted, the oceanic life is taking longer to catalogue than the terrestrial and mammalian populations. What's hampering this collection isn't pressure or friction or depth but rather simplifying categorization. It is rare that we find so many disparate flavours of intelligence in a single habitat, but to find mammalian [standard] intelligence along with Schyzophoa and Cephalopoda in oceans further enhances the theory that this planet has seen interference or experiment in its past. This kind of distributed intelligence symmetry tends to hint at artifice.
What's making things more difficult is the rather distasteful process of testing living samples against simulated attack. I find this task immoral, even as I embrace its necessity. I wish that the entire test process could be undertaken synthetically or virtually. But safety precautions prevail. Eventually we will have a simpler baseline measure, and more depressingly, eventually we may have to make an artificial rather than scientific cutoff line.
The primitive simians were simple to categorise by comparison. But of course the more sophisticated ones are proving as enigmatic and evasive as ever.
Typically I prefer outreach and contact, but some regrettable abductions have been necessary.
The differing subspecies and races within the local population of prospects is a situation causing headaches of its own. They may be genetically very close, but their cultures and attitudes are dramatically different. I can attribute some, but not all, of that to their different physical makeup, although surprisingly the C-types, while physically massive and much more powerful than the B-types, are less aggressive and warlike. In fact, they're agrarian by nature and peaceful in intent and outlook. This may, in the long term, hamper their progress here.
The A-types show the most potential for moral intelligence - but it's possible their lack of physical stature might impede them in direct competition with the other two, where tool use and culture do not give them the upper hand. Still, I have high hopes for them. And I enjoy their company even if they don't fully understand what I am, or why I'm here.
The B-types are curious and will watch our activity from a distance, but they're not as gregarious, and seldom venture too close. The C-types are oddly oblivious to our activity, as if it were a mountain or a river that they simply expected to be here.
I miss my friends however, and one especially.
The facility here is impressive. I'm almost embarrassed to have this much access to technology. It's frustrating however, to be this close to "civilisation" and the people I love, yet hermetically sealed away from them by security protocols. In better days, this facility would simply be an open doorway, through which we could all travel and enjoy this world for what it is - the core of a deeper enigma.
But one I feel confident we'll solve one day. I'm the eternal optimist, after all?
Signing off.
L.
(Underlined for importance) It seems that Earth and it's inhabitants are an experiment that pre-dates the Forerunner. The implications are delicious.